Apollo Bay to Warrnambool

Feeling a lot better today, up and out early. The scenery is amazing and the road is a great driving road. I turned of the main road to take the side road down to Cape Otway Lighthouse. I thought it was only a short distance off the main road but it turned out to be 14 kilometres (which is really nothing here!) It claims to be the oldest continuously lit lighthouse in Australia and also the point where the first telegraph cable came ashore from Tasmaina. The Light house and the surrounding buildings is now a museum and the 'real lighthouse is a small 10ft post to the front of it (between it and the sea) with a small beacon light on it, this is due to modern shipping now using GPS to plot their passage through the straights to the South of the Lighthouse. Originally when the Lighthouse was in operation the beam could apparently be seen from 37km away at sea. The new one is visible to about 15! Before the lighthouse was built the straights were treacherous to shipping and many boat hit the reefs and sunk. The old rule being never to pass the lighthouse at night! The lenses on the lamp are huge and sit in a special bath of mercury to give them a frictionless bearing to turn on and they are that strong that in the morning and evening the keepers had to draw blackout curtains to specific places to shade the sun from shining directly into the lenses as that would cause the filaments to burnout because of the 'reverse' magnification of the sun!
There was also a number of other buildings at the site including the Telegraph Hut which had also doubled as a School and a house at various times in it's life, a WWII Radar station that was installed after a US Ship was sunk off the coast by a German U-Boat.
I drove back up to the main road and continued on the main road. Not much further on a number of people had stopped in a Eucalyptus wooded area and I realised they were all Wallaby watching, so I pulled over and joined them. There were quite a few of them just chilling out in the branches of the trees right next to the roads and ignoring all the tourists below with camera's snapping away. I stopped at a Junction in the Road called Lavers Hill for a coffee and then set off again until I came across the 12 Apostles. This is a rock formation on the coast which is where columns of rock have been left standing whilst the softer rock around them has been eroded. Originally there were 12 but some have crumbled into the sea and I'm not sure how many are actually left but all the same it was very impressive from the view point. I then drove onto Warrnambool and found a campsite for the night in the centre of the town. By now the cloud had bubbled up and by the time I had my tent up a heavy sea mist had rolled in. I sat in the camp kitchen and watched an episode of Border Patrol on TV which strangely was featuring Manchester Airport! My neck is a lot better tonight and a managed to go to bed without painkillers (and I'm still off the beer!)